Saturday, December 20, 2008

We're mentioning it on an upcoming podcast, but in case you haven't heard, Majel Barrett died from leukemia Thursday December 18th.

Besides being the wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry until his death in 1991, she also was a feature in several incarnations of Trek.

Probably my favorite character of hers was her first Star Trek contribution, Number One -- second in command to Captain Pike, which was her character in the pilot episode. She then took the role of McCoy's assistant, Nurse Chapel and appeared as that character in several original series episodes and movies. Later, she voiced the character Lt. M'Ress in the animated series. Probably her two most well-known roles were in Next Generation as Counselor Troi's mother, Lwaxana and as the voice of the ship's computer (which she went on to voice in the other incarnations of Star Trek). Apparently she just finished the voice work for her role as the ship's computer in J.J. Abrams' new Trek movie.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Alright, this is monu (wait for it) mental! Probably the most anticipated event in the history of this podcast happens right here in Podcast #19. We're speaking of course of finally getting to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Hopefully our "praise" of the show will appease the die-hards.

Monday, November 17, 2008

I don't think Paramount will be mad at us for posting this. You can download the trailer for free on iTunes. Perhaps Apple will be mad at us for posting this.

What do y'all think? I think that before the trailer I was worried most of all about Simon Pegg, because he's too much of a comedic actor. But when I saw him in the trailer for that half second he really really looked like Scotty. Maybe it's just me. Also it looks like in this universe Spock gets really pissed. That could be cool. It happened in the original Transformers movie when Megatron turned into Galvatron and Spock voiced Galvatron and he was super pissed and it was super cool.

'Star Trek': An exclusive first look at the Enterprise

JJ Abrams wasn't a huge fan of the original Star Trek TV series as a kid, but he does have one unabashed gee-whiz Star Trek memory: watching the first feature film (1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and marveling over the big reveal of the Enterprise during a long sequence in which James T. Kirk takes a slow-boat tour around the iconic starship. "The coolest thing about it—maybe the coolest thing in the movie—was when you flew around the ship, you could see all the different panels that made up the ship," says the director of the forthcoming Trek reboot, slated for a May 8, 2009 release. "It was the first time I had ever seen that level of attention, that love of detail, given to the tangible, practical reality of the ship."

Here, in this exclusive first look at Abrams' take on the Enterprise, you not only see his vision of the ship, but his attempt to evoke that sequence from the first film that so captured his imagination. If you're thinking, "Wow! It looks the way the Enterprise has always looked"—well look at the big Spock brain on you! Abrams wanted to take the original TV series Enterprise and the movie franchise Enterprise and fuse them together into a new yet familiar Enterprise. His ambition was a ship that felt very realistic, that could "stand up" to today's f/x standards—and beyond. "If you're going to do Star Trek there are many things you cannot change. The Enterprise is a visual touchstone for so many people. So if you're going to do the Enterprise, it better look like the Enterprise, because otherwise, what are you doing?"

Fans and other interested parties will get more looks at the new Enterprise when the first trailer arrives this Friday, attached to Quantum of Solace. And if you missed the additional 11 Star Trek photos we debuted last month, click here and check 'em out.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Once again we enter the realm of "good even" Star Trek movies. This time the Enterprise goes to the Earth-like planet of '80s San Francisco. And we totally the hell finished posting this podcast on time.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Aren't our listeners great? Here is some interesting correspondence that we weren't able to talk about completely in the podcast:

Thought you might be interested in some more material on Lee Meriwether AKA Losira AKA "Hot Lady Budget" from the TOS 3rd Season episode "That Which Survives"

Besides playing the role of Catwoman in the 1966 Batman feature film, did you know that Lee Meriwether was also Miss America 1955? Beauty definitely does survive.

What originally attracted me to "That Which Survives", or TWS for short was the "Hot Lady Budget." But, as I watched this episode repeatedly for this, I also came away with the opinion that this episode is terrific for so many other things as well. (Not that "Hot Lady Budget" wasn't the most important.)

First, Losira's island/world, was artificially created by her people, the Kalandans, as an outpost, much like a starbase for the Federation. The difference here is that her peoples' idea of a starbase is creating an entire world. The reason they needed to create a world as massive as our Earth but with only the size of our moon was that they used the magnetic field (read magnetic sweep/door opening/closing) from it to power their outpost. This included the interstellar transporter (confirmed in the REMASTERED Version of TWS with a blinking F/X) that bounced the Enterprise 990.7 light years away as well as the defense system of killer holograms used to disrupt Losira's victims to death. Although not stated, since holographic technology was just invented when this episode was shot, Losira is, in fact, a hologram, & quite a beautiful one at that for sure. This shows just how forward-thinking the writers of Trek are.

This outpost was created to expand the reach of Kalandan territory & with a space transporter that can span 1,000 light years in the blink of an eye, her people can move around & cover/explore a vast amount of new territory.

The problem was that when they engineered this planet, they also accidentally created a lethal disease that killed off everyone there, with Losira being the last to go. Fearing her Kalandan Outpost might fall into the hands of outsiders & with the defense system not yet fully operational, Losira hastily programmed a holographic defense program which used the only available image, hers, to defend the place until more of her people could arrive to take possession of the place. Equipping the holograms with the ability to kill intruders with cellular disruption & using the super interstellar transporter to magically transport these holograms to wherever they are needed makes for a very effective defense.

I know you might be thinking, how so?

Consider the Hot Lady Budget hologram as the ultimate smart bomb. She is so specific that there is no explosion/collateral damage, only complete cellular disruption of her target minus the messy goo. That's the only reason why Captain Kirk isn't dead from Losira's touch. What if the target isn't biological? She did sabotage the Enterprise's engines to go wild & speed the ship & the crew to destruction, didn't she? And, she also had the power to do so when she fused the matter-anti-matter cutoff switch, which Scotty informed Spock required all the power from their main phaser banks to accomplish. Also remember that the Losira holograms were totally immune to phaser fire, as Sulu found out when she came for him. Reading minds while tossing starships zillions of miles away? That's a pretty nasty defense system that Losira was able to put together on the fly. When you include the fact that the hologram, like Losira, were drop-dead gorgeous, it's a wonder how any man could have resisted/survived her attacks.

The question then becomes, how & why did Kirk & company survive their encounter with Losira?

You said it yourself.

"The defense system did maintain ideas of right & wrong from the original woman such as it's not OK to kill."

This explanation makes perfect sense. Why knock a starship a 1,000 light years away when you can just transport it inside a planet or sun? Why not simply overload the warp core of the ship?

As Captain Kirk explained at the end, "the computer was too perfect." "It projected so much of Losira's personality into the replica that it felt regret, guilt at killing." "That bought us the time we needed to destroy it."

Don't you see? When Losira transferred her likeness into the base computer, it also received this as well. The only reason why Kirk & Company are still alive is because the real Losira within the computer was stalling & buying enough time for Captain Kirk to successfully shut down the computer. What you have is defense computer that has gone schizo. Losira successfully convinces the computer to transport the Enterprise 990.7 light years away instead of just destroying the ship on the spot. The price for this action is that the computer gets to use Losira to succesfully kill the redshirt operating the transporter. Instead of blowing up the Enterprise immediately when she begins warping back to her planet, Losira successfully damages the ship so it would take 20 minutes to be destroyed, knowing it can be fixed while increasing it's speed to the point where it can get back in time to save the landing party. In response, the computer succeeds in forcing her to kill/attempt to kill a whole lot of people such as Engineer Grade 4 John B. Watkins, Senior Geologist D'Amato, Kirk, & the rest of the landing party.

I just feel that if enough fans had stuck with the story that they could have figured all this out. But then again, it's very hard when you have such a hot babe like Lee Meriwether playing such an exotic creature such as Losira.

Please feel free to respond to my conclusions since this is my favorite TOS episode for all these reasons & more. Also, can you tell me why you thought Losira is so hot? I have my reasons & I would like to know yours. She, as you can tell, is also my favorite TOS babe. Was it her costume as well as her physical attributes? makeup/hairdo?

Let me know & I'm glad that I'm not the only person who feels this way about her.;)

Toward the end we mentioned that we were going to do another movie commentary with the movie Poltergeist and that we wanted all of you to join us. Well, you can't because inbetween the recording and production of this particular podcast, we went ahead and did the other one. Sorry.

One thing we forgot to mention is the continued ignorance of Kirk and his Vulcan knowledge. He didn't even know what a Vulcan katra was. He must have not taken his Federation cultural and aliens studies class very seriously.

We also said that we didn't know what Kirstie Alley did between Star Trek II and Cheers. How could we forget Runaway, the classic sci-fi film starring Magnum P.I. and KISS? That movie was actually the same year as STIII.This podcast is dedicated in loving memory to Merritt Butrick (1959-1989).

Friday, October 24, 2008

Those of you you joined us for the Wednesday podcast are probably wondering what the holdup is. Some other stuff came crashing down, so the podcast edit isn't quite happening yet. It may be up before the weekend is over. You can keep checking back or checking iTunes, but I'm guessing it'll be up sometime Monday.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Enough time has passed between podcasts to warrant an official apology.

There are two possible reasons for this:

1) It's October. The podcast is a really really fun thing that both of us enjoy doing, but October is also traditionally filled with other fun things that we do every year. We can only have so much fun because we're both getting old and one of us has a ton of kids.

2) J.R. insists on using Blockbuster Online, which we all know is way inferior to Netflix. And also he lives in Hawaii and they only get one shipment of Star Trek DVDs a year and it comes on a tugboat. Somebody send him an email and tell him to freakin' get a hold of Star Trek III.

Friday, September 26, 2008

This podcast is a DVD commentary of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It will probably be funner to listen to it while watching the movie, but hopefully we've made it fun enough (and you've seen the most popular Star Trek movie enough) that it can be enjoyed without the visual accompaniment. This is also a "simul-podcast" with The Jon Madsen Movie Commentary Podcast

It's okay to cry.

Not too much of a sense to lay out the show rundown. Pretty much all of it is the commentary.

Likelihood of the events of this movie happening: 11,718,750,000,000 to one.

Comments/corrections: I think toward the end we wondered why they couldn't beam the Genesis away from the Reliant and shut it off manually. Well, thinking about in now, it seems like David says to Kirk that it couldn't be shut off, so that solves that. But then again, what poor sap were they planning on getting to activate the Genesis Device without getting totally nuked because he couldn't get away in time?

Monday, September 22, 2008

Thursday, September 18, 2008

And thus we begin the movie franchise with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (yes, thanks for actually informing us that it's a movie)!

Discussion of ST:TMP does not begin, however, without first wrapping up the original series with a list of awards that frankly and obviously weren't worked on very hard (but were still plenty humorous (or not -- maybe you just had to be there)).

Joining the talk about ST:TMP is our buddy Pete, whom you may recognize as the guy who went with Jon to the Star Trek Experience. Somehow, being on the podcast counted toward his community service.

Okay, fine. That was a lame set of rankings since we only officially discussed one movie. To be fair, Jon said ST:TMP was his sixth favorite Star Trek movie, Pete said it was his third favorite and J.R. said it was his second favorite (he's seen two).

Corrections/errors: There was a point where Jon said that we've been recording for an hour and 20 minutes when it was an hour and 40 minutes into the podcast. This can be explained by the fact that we (very obviously) recorded the first segment of random TOS awards after we recorded the discussion about the movie.

This podcast is dedicated in loving memory to Persis Khambatta (1950-1998).

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

It saddens us that this is our last original series podcast, but it should gladden you that we supersized it! We present well over two hours of JRWSTftft this time around. Included is our take on the last four episodes plus our best/worst picks of Season 3, PLUS our best/worst TOS picks of all time!

Jon is the one who said he was sick, but that's J.R. who's got the sniffles.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

For some strange reason neither of us mentioned how there was another episode about the Garden of Eden in this bunch. "The Way To Eden" is all about Eden and there's even a character named Adam who dies by eating fruit there. Why didn't we mention the Star Trek writers' fascination with Eden? Maybe because we already have five times.

J.R.4. "The Way to Eden"3. "The Lights of Zetar"2. "That Which Survives"1. "Requiem for Methuselah"

Jon4. "That Which Survives"3. "The Lights of Zetar"2. "The Way to Eden"1. "Requiem for Methuselah"

Everyone remember to email jrwatchesstartrek@gmail.com and holler your input on what order we should do the movies. Right now we're planning on watching the first four movies and then switching to Next Generation. Would you rather we discuss all six original crew movies before tackling TNG?

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

First of all, take heed of our new email address: jrwatchesstartrek@gmail.com. Speak to us!

And... meh. The email is really the only really important announcement, but remember to head to the Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton before the end of the month!

We've overcome the hump on season 3 by covering five episodes in this run. The light is at the end of the tunnel; we can see it (and along with that light a floating Abraham Lincoln for some reason)! Podcast 12 is a party especially if you like non-Star Trek things like ABBA, X Files, Wayne's World, road trips, World of Warcraft, Silver Spoons, Jessica Biel and BYU football.

the point of this

J.R. used to make fun of Jon for watching Star Trek. Now J.R. has agreed to watch Star Trek from the very beginning so that he can objectively continue to make fun of Jon. Will he waver? Join his long, arduous journey.